manage the dependency of jsondiff and jsonpatch

[erikyao]

Definition

From rfc6902:

JSON Patch defines a JSON document structure for expressing a sequence of operations to apply to a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) document; it is suitable for use with the HTTP PATCH method. The "application/json-patch+json" media type is used to identify such patch documents.

If two documents, old_doc and new_doc, are involved, we say:

• We diff old_doc and new_old, resulting in a patch p
• We apply patch p to old_doc, resulting in a new document equal to new_doc

Two modules in our codebase can do the diffs

• biothings.utils.jsondiff, whose only purpose is to diff two JSON documents
• biothings.utils.jsonpatch, which is actually a copy of the PyPi - jsonpatch

Dependency Management

Some questions towards these 2 modules:

• biothings.utils.jsonpatch is a copy of the 1.13 version, while PyPi - jsonpatch has been developed to 1.32. Any particular reason to keep the old version in our code base? Can we just install jsonpatch as a library?
• jsonpatch.make_patch() can replace jsondiff.make() if we don't take the element order in list values into account. jsondiff has two option variables, UNORDERED_LIST and USE_LIST_OPS, to enable/disable the diff operation on list values, however are they really used in the codebase?
  • Plus I prefer to making these 2 global options as parameters to jsondiff.make()

[erikyao]

Related Issues:

• Delete redundant src/utils/jsondiff.py myvariant.info#144